Yesterday, I discovered ifttt, which stands for "If this, then that", and got totally absorbed and lost in it for about a half hour or more. In my case, it started with a link on one of my other favorite tools, Evernote, teasing me with the promise that I could star an item in Gmail, and have it automatically sent to what I refer to as my "other brain". I wish I could say that it ended there, but those who know me also know how much I like to "play" with new stuff like this.
Basically, what ifttt (pronounced "ift") does is automate tasks, based on conditions you set up. For the non-geeks among you, this isn't as scary as it sounds, because they make it really easy. I think the trickiest part for me was the concept of activating what they refer to as a "channel", which, in plain English, is simply authorizing ifttt to access the service you want to automate. So, in the example above, I activated the Evernote and Gmail channels. From there, you can either create your own task from scratch (which is pretty simple to do), or choose from a list of what they call "recipes" - tasks that others have already created. For my Evernote and Gmail example above, I chose a pre-created recipe because it was already there. Then, I started to get creative...
One thing I've really wanted to figure out is an easy way to automatically update my various blogs with a photo post, in particular, my Dollar Store Junk blog. Using ifttt, I activated the Instagram channel, and created a task that will automatically add a photo post for any photo I tag with #dollarstore to my Dollar Store Junk blog. So now, whenever I'm in the dollar store and take a picture that I want posted on my blog, all I have to do is add #dollarstore to the description, and it will post itself. I then did the same with Wordpress for my Non-scale Victories & Other Weight Loss Miracles blog for food photos tagged with #weightwatchers.
You can have it do all sorts of cool stuff, like send you an instant message if you get an e-mail from a certain person, dictate blog entries, e-mails, notes, etc. via phone, update your facebook status, post tweets, send e-mails, etc. The list is pretty much endless, and definitely worth checking out!
